The fact that I have to pay someone to remove an "asset" fails the logic test.

Logic is easy if you're willing to use it.

I'd pay for your "asset" if I were a processer who sold the finished product to manufacturers and you delivered it to me. But as a processer, I'm not going to pay you for a few cardboard boxes and plastic bottles every week. I need those raw materials by the truckload and in a predictable amount- like what your town can produce.

But if your town wants to actually turn their truckloads of garbage into an asset, they need to entirely duplicate their garbage collection infrastructure to have a different facility and a second fleet of trucks with all their attendant support. Without doing that and having a processer lined up who can in turn sell to manufacturers, all you've got in your bin is household trash that you need to pay to get rid of. All those steps aren't going to get paid for by the sale of used cardboard and tin cans, they're going to raise that money with a bond and everyone's going to pay that bond off with a few bucks a month. Without doing that and having a processer lined up who can in turn sell to manufacturers, all you've got in your bin is household trash that you need to pay to get rid of.

So is that really an added expense? No, the bond would have to be raised even without recycling because the town would need a new dump. Getting paid for the recycled material isn't a real income stream, but it does help defray some of the costs that you would have been incurring anyway in disposing of your waste.

Didn't Penn say that forty percent of material put in recycling bins is thrown away? That sounds accurate to me, not so much from them being excessively particular, or recycling being less useful than people want to believe, but because many people simply do not care. I remember asking a friend in high school where his garbage can was and he said they just used the recycling bin, because they did not care. I find all kinds of household garbage in the recycling. They say that they reject any recyclables with a single speck of food. I am surprised they find 60% to recycle, considering how easy to contaminate it must be. Oh, pizza boxes are recyclable!

I'd pay for your "asset" if I were a processer who sold the finished product to manufacturers and you delivered it to me. But as a processer, I'm not going to pay you for a few cardboard boxes and plastic bottles every week. I need those raw materials by the truckload and in a predictable amount- like what your town can produce.

Very good points.

However, I maintain that if the garbage man is going to be visiting anyhow, and I've roughly sorted my assets (recyclables) from my liabilities (garbage), then at the very minimum, the garbage collection company can sell the large amounts they collect at a price that offsets the collection fee.

Logic still demands that, at a minimum, recyclables can be collected at no expense to the person giving up the goods. If that can't be achieved, it implies that it's cheaper to just produce new materials. To follow the logic further; if it's cheaper to produce new materials, then it's likely that less total energy is expended in producing new prime material than is expended in the collection, transportation, sorting, and reclaiming of used material. Environmentally speaking, it might be better if some recyclable goods were thrown away instead of reprocessed.

While the notion that it may be better to throw things away instead of recycle them is uncomfortable to me; I accept that it may be the truth for certain items.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xist

Didn't Penn say that forty percent of material put in recycling bins is thrown away? That sounds accurate to me, not so much from them being excessively particular, or recycling being less useful than people want to believe, but because many people simply do not care.

It sounds accurate to me, too. I see people at work "recycle" all kinds of things that can't be recycled. Heck, I'd even be tempted to "recycle" things that aren't recyclable if my tiny garbage can was full and my massive recycle can had room.

Asking each and every individual in every home to sort garbage from recyclables, and then get the result that half of it isn't sorted properly is incredibly inefficient. It would be better to just collect garbage along with the recyclables and employ more trained professionals to sort through it. They would be way faster and more accurate at performing that function than the millions of dopes already doing a pitiful job.

Heck, the ideal solution would be to tell the people in the business of recycling that they can have all of the product they want for free; all they have to do is pick it out from among the trash.

From a production standpoint, recycled materials have to compete with new materials.

From a waste disposal standpoint, recycling has a pretty competitive position by reducing the load on landfills and incinerators while letting you get paid something for what gets trucked away instead of paying to have it trucked away. How much you get paid is less important than the fact that money is moving in the opposite direction now.

If the holy grail of medieval alchemists was turning lead into gold, how much more magical would it be to draw gold from, well, poop? It turns out that a ton of sludge, the goo left behind when treating sewage, could contain several hundred dollars’ worth of metals—potentially enough to generate millions of dollars worth of gold, silver, and other minerals each year for a city of a million people.

I try and be open to new ideas.
I watched the video, and while it brings up several valid defects in the recycling process, it failed to offer any solutions to the problem.

One thing that I hate about discussions on the internet is that everything you know as a fact has a debunking argument out there. ( Also, it wastes so much time !! )

Unless you are truly evil, you probably feel that it is a morally right thing to do to feed a hungry person, yet unless you chose to do so yourself, there are arguments to the contrary.
A person could point out that it is actually worse to feed someone that is starving in another country because the effort and expense it takes to feed them could be used to feed many more people. They might point out that the pollution caused by the transport of the food results in long term health effects, or that in the process of transporting the food, 'X' tons are wasted, which could be used to feed people locally, and so on and so forth.
While i may be true that we have more trees today in America than we did in 1920, it was not pointed out that many of these trees are not the size of the trees that they have replaced, because they are still growing.
And what about species diversity ? Are the trees that have replaced the forest been selected for fast growth and wood quality or as a replacement for the tree that was cut down.
And what of forest in other parts of the world ? Are they being replaced too, or simply being used as timber that now is clearcut.

Penn discussed the sludge and pollution produced in the recycling and bleaching process of the paper, without mentioning that this same sludge and pollution is caused when all paper is created, regardless of whether or not it is new paper or recycled.
If you have a load of white office paper that is bleached in the recycling process, isn't it common sense to assume that it takes less bleach than ( new ) brown paper pulp ?
It was pointed out that plastics do not have a good profit return when recycled, yet the idea of using less plastics in the first place was not mentioned. For example, think of how many things could be packaged using corrugated cardboard, versus styrofoam made from plastics.
At my job we throw out enough styrofoam to fill a box truck...every single day 365 days a year.
Since the company i work for makes a profit from recycling cardboard, they make sure everyone bales the stuff up and ships it out.
( The did away with plastic recycling because, while they made a slight profit, they felt it was not worth the "effort". )
Is anyone here familiar with the Great Pacific garbage patch ? Surely you are right ? Great Pacific garbage patch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The fellow in the earlier mentioned video mentioned that it was wrong to force people to recycle by law, because this was imposing their views on his lifestyle.
Seat-belts were opposed the same way when they were first made into a law.
Human nature is to take the easy route, and unless there is a law, people will ignore any advice, no matter how beneficial it is.

It's a shame that greed corrupts everything. There are a huge number of obstacles to overcome with recycling, but unless money can be made from it, no one cares.